Willie Garson played one of TV’s most memorable gay characters on “Sex and the City” — but he never liked to talk about the fact that he was actually straight in real life.
“For years I didn’t talk about it because I found it to be offensive to gay people,” Garson, who played Carrie’s friend Stanford Blatch on the beloved series, told Page Six.
“People playing gay characters jumping up and down screaming that they’re not gay, like that would somehow be a bad thing if they were.”
Garson — who said, “I’ve never been straight closeted, is that a thing?” — added that he came up with a stock answer for when interviewers would bring up his heterosexuality.
“When the question would come up during the show I would say, ‘When I was on “White Collar” no one ever asked me if I was a conman, and when I was on “NYPD Blue,” nobody ever asked me if I was a murderer. This is what we do for a living, portray people,'” the 56-year-old actor explained.
Garson did admit that playing a gay character on such a popular show put a crimp on his dating life.
“At the beginning, you would approach someone at a bar and realize, ‘Oh, they want to be Stanford’s best friend.’ They don’t necessarily want to sleep with you,” he laughed.
“Sex and the City” ran from 1998 to 2004, and was made into two movies in 2008 and 2010, both of which Garson appeared in.
Garson is also the single father of 19-year-old son Nathen, whom he adopted from the foster care system at 7 years old.
“I very much always wanted to have a child,” Garson explained. “I had a long relationship, off and on, for like 20 years and she never wanted to have a child, which is fine. And it was like my mid-life crisis, I really wanted a child more than anything else and I got one. We’re partners, my kid and I.”
Garson is such a proponent of adoption that he has joined the board of the charity You Gotta Believe, an organization dedicated to helping find loving parents for older children in foster care.
“They do kids up to aging out and beyond even because everyone needs a family,” he says.
To celebrate National Adoption Month, Garson will host a virtual event on Nov. 17, called “Building a Family,” in which he’ll have a conversation with actress Nia Vardalos, who also adopted her daughter from foster care.